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General Guide by Packlit

This build has been archived and is for historical display only.

PLEASE NOTE: This build has been archived by the author. They are no longer supporting nor updating this build and it may have become outdated. As such, voting and commenting have been disabled and it no longer appears in regular search results.

Not Updated For Current Season

This guide has not yet been updated for the current season. Please keep this in mind while reading. You can see the most recently updated guides on the browse guides page.

Introduction

Let me start off this guide with a simple question:

Why are you on Mobafire?

The common answer would usually be "I came to MobaFire so I can find a build guide for a champion". Now, there are some exceptions, such as Laggermeister ("I came so I can downvote ****ty guides"), but this is generally the main reason why Mobafire even exists in the first place.

This is all fine and dandy, nothing wrong with wanting a quick, clean guide to build your champions with. However, there comes a point in every n00bs life where they want to become better players (also known as "Pros"), and one of the many first steps to doing that is learning how your items interact with your champion, and learning how to build a champion to fit your style of play.

This guide is intended to instruct players, both fully green and level 30, on how to properly construct an efficient, fully-working build for their favourite champion that fits within their playstyle and idea of that champions mechanics. We will be going over how to analyze items, champions, item-to-skill synergies, pure item synergies, and more.

References

Before you begin, there are a few important references you should keep in tabs.

I highly recommend reading theBMB'sIn-Depth Item Guide if you are not familiar with the many items in LoL and their associated terminology. You will have a difficult time with this guide if you dont understand what the word "CC" means or which boots give you swiftness (Hint: Boots of Swiftness).

LoLWiki Items Page is where I extrapolated a lot of my information from, and this will also be your biggest ally in analyzing different items and abilities. This is absolutely essential in working with this guide. You CAN also use Mobafire's own built-in wiki, but it isn't as in-depth as it should be.

1a. Analysis: Items

Welcome to Part 1 of my guide. This section will outline how to analyze an item or champion skillset and have a full understanding of its mechanics. This is required to carry on with the guide.

Lets begin with items.

One of the very first steps to analyzing items is by reading the item description. I will be using the standard LoL Wiki format for the descriptions and efficiencies (which are not true efficiencies, but are close enough).

Example Item

Name: Long SwordTier: BasicCost: 400 Gold (0)Efficiency: Base

Stats: +10 Attack Damage

Pretty easy, huh? Well, just for consistency, let's go over this description.

Name: This should be easy enough, shouldn't it?

Tier: An item tier is basically the trading card equivalent of "Commons" and "Rares". It represents where that item is in terms of stats and build ladder. As you can see, Long Sword is in the second-lowest tier, Basic, right above Consumables. In my opinion, this information isn't too important, but it's good to remember this just for reference.

Stats: In a nutshell, what this item gives you. Long Sword is quite a simple example, giving you just +10 additional Attack Damage. Some stats can be Active abilities, and others Passives, which are denoted as such.

Cost: How much gold it costs to purchase that item. This ties in with efficiency. The number in the brackets denotes the recipe cost, or how much it costs to "put everything together".

Efficiency: Now, this is a little difficult to describe. Efficiency is how much worth an item is for the amount of gold you spent on it. This is calculated by using the lowest Basic tier items as a point of reference. As a result, Long Sword has exactly 1:1 item efficiency. Remember that efficiency DOES NOT calculate Active and Passive abilities unless they are directly stat-based.

Hopefully this won't be too difficult to remember. Now, lets continue by analyzing a bigger item, namely the most expensive item in the game.

Wow, this is a LOT to swallow. Lets go over the stats first. Aside from the myriad of basic stats given to you, Trinity Force also offers two unique passive abilities. The first one is named "Icy", which gives you a chance to slow an enemy by 30% with your autoattacks. The second, and most iconic one, is named "Spellblade", which empowers your next autoattack upon using any abilities.

Now, remember that this "Spellblade" is actually a lot different from the other "Spellblade"'s given by items like Lich Bane and Iceborn Gauntlet. Be sure to closely read what those passives or actives actually are before you continue with your analysis.

Alright, so we have successfully analyzed an item! Well, no, not really. Item analysis is only helpful if you have something to compare that item to, something that you want to put that item on. Of course, this leads us into our next part: Champion Analysis.

1b. Analysis: Champions

LoL is a big, complex game. 100+ champions means around 400+ unique abilities, 100+ unique passives, and a lot of unique lore, design, etc. Now, whether or not these abilities, passives, lore, etc. are actually UNIQUE or not (I'm looking at YOUR backstory, Miss Fortune) are not that important. What IS important is how these abilities interact with your items, and how you can capitalize on that with your next build.

Type: Denotes whether this item requires a keypress, multiple keypresses, or no keypresses at all, and which key it is assigned to. Also denotes how the ability affects said champion, and how it functions. Since Frost Shot is toggleable, we press Q once to turn it on, and again to turn it off. Since it changes how Ashe's autoattacks work, it is classified as a Modifier.

Cooldown: The amount of time for the ability to be used again. Since Frost Shot is a Toggleable Modifier, it does not have any cooldown, although some Toggleable Modifiers do have cooldown.

Description: Equivalent of stats. The numbers in the brackets separated by slashes indicates that the effect is modified by every level point put into it.

Cost: How much mana/health/other variable is consumed upon using said ability, and what constitutes as "using" the ability.

Lets move on to a bigger ability. Nothing huge yet, but something a little more common amongst our 100+ champions.

Description: Ezreal fires a bolt of energy in a line that will deal 35/55/75/95/115 (+ 100% AD)(+ 20% AP) physical damage and apply on-hit effects to the first enemy it hits. If it strikes an enemy unit, all of Ezreal's cooldowns will be reduced by 1 second.

Alright, lets go over this one. Firstly, this ability is classified as an Active Skillshot, meaning that activating it fires an untargeted, or "dumbfire", projectile. There are other variables to go over, such as range and projectile speed, but those are unnecessary for now (unless you are analyzing Nidalee).

Mystic Shot applies on-hit effects, which is a fancy way of saying that autoattack modifiers are applied to this ability as well. It also reduces the cooldown of all abilities on cooldown by 1 second, but only if it hits an enemy.

Another thing to go over is scaling. Mystic Shot deals 35/55/75/95/115 on hit, with (+ 100% AD)(+ 20% AP) scaling. This means that it scales 1:1 with Attack Damage, but only scales 20% of your Ability Power. Of course, it's good to keep in mind that Ability Power is a lot more easily attained than Attack Damage, but that still doesn't make up for its poor scaling...or does it? This leads us into our next section: Synergies.

2. Synergies: Items and Abilities

Welcome to Part 2 of my guide. This section will outline how to compare analyzed items with analyzed abilities, how to find the synergies between them, and how to combine them with other items/abilities.

In our previous section, we did an analysis of Ezreal's Active Skillshot, named Mystic Shot. As we saw, it has 1:1 Attack Damage scaling, but very poor Ability Power scaling. Let's see if we can make up for this by analyzing another item, and I think I found the perfect one.

So what does all of this mean? Well, lets look back at Mystic Shot's description, mainly that it applies on-hit effects. In other words, using Mystic Shot will also proc (activate) Spellblade on that ability. This means that, with this item, Mystic Shot has 95% Ability Power scaling and deals an additional 50 damage.

This is still below Mystic Shots Attack Damage scaling by a bit, but remember: getting Ability Power is a lot more easier than getting Attack Damage. In fact, where the highest attainable Attack Damage from items alone is only 610, the highest attainable Ability Power from items alone is 1014!

Before we get all caught up in this, however, we should remember that there also exists Trinity Force, the Attack Damage counterpart to Lich Bane, and it deals 150% of base attack damage.

You see, although one item and ability may synergize perfectly, you also have to take into account the rest of said champions kit. Reducing your champion to a one-trick pony is just shooting yourself in the foot, and you need to build according to your preferred roles, playstyle, and understanding of that champion. Every champion has a minimum of four abilities, every champion has one passive ability, and every champion has 6 item slots. This leads us into our third section...

3a. Builds: Good Example

Welcome to Part 3 of my guide. This section will outline how to properly build a champion from the ground up, utilizing every item slot available. It will also go over analyzing different builds, cross-item and cross-ability synergies, and will show some examples of good and bad builds/how to avoid them.

Playing LoL is an intricate dance. Every ability has a purpose, and it is our job as players to find those purposes and utilize them to the highest possible efficiency. As a result, to attain that highest efficiency, we must use the most efficient build for that champion.

We should start this section off by analyzing a fully completed build, champion abilities and all. Lets take one of the highest rated guides available now as an example.

Description: After a 1 second casting time, Caitlyn fires a projectile that deals 20/60/100/140/180 (+ 130% AD) physical damage to all targets it passes through. Each target hit after the first takes 10% less damage, down to a minimum of 50% of the original damage.

Description: Caitlyn sets a trap at target location that activates after a brief delay. When an enemy champion comes within range of the trap, the trap snares and deals 80/130/180/230/280 (+ 60% AP) magic damage to the enemy over 1.5 seconds, also revealing the enemy for 9 seconds.
Caitlyn can set up to 3 traps and each lasts 4 minutes. Traps are visible to both allies and enemies. If she sets a trap when three are already placed, the oldest trap will deactivate itself.

Description: Caitlyn channels for 1 second, providing vision of target enemy champion. She then fires a homing projectile to the target, dealing 250/475/700 (+ 200% bonus AD) physical damage to the first enemy champion it hits. Other enemy champions can intercept the bullet.

UNIQUE Active: Drains target champion, dealing 15% of the champion's maximum Health in physical damage and healing you for the damage dealt. Additionally you steal 30% of their movement speed for 4 seconds - 60 second cooldown.

When analyzing an entire build, the first thing we must understand is the role. We must first ask, "Does this build fit the guide/champion's designated role?" Yes. Next, we must ask "Does this role fit this champion, and is it both effective and practical?" The answer is, again, yes.

This build for Caitlyn is based on her being in the role of a DPS Carry, meaning she is built to cause a large, sustained amount of damage through autoattacking. We know that this is effective because we analyzed her abilities, such as Headshot. She has a good amount of utility, but most of them are used defensively rather than offensively. Now that we have established that, lets take a look at her items and how they interact with her abilities.

In the build guides' item list, The Bloodthirster is listed as situational. You may be asking yourself "Why is that? The Bloodthirster has the highest amount of Attack Damage to offer, and gives you life steal as well!". Although this is true and many other DPS champs will carry (teehee) this item with them, there is a specific synergy with Blade of the Ruined King and Caitlyn: Her passive.

Now, you may still be doubting this. Caitlyn's abilities scale greatly with Attack Damage, meaning that The Bloodthirster is still a better item, right? This is where Caitlyn's role comes into play. Choosing stronger abilities over stronger autoattacks means that you lean more to a bursty role rather than a DPS role, and a lack of consistency is usually more detrimental than beneficial. For this same reason, Statikk Shiv is listed as situational as well, not providing enough raw DPS although giving a good amount of burst damage.

Of course, this is all dependent on your playstyle, which is why those items are "situational" in the first place. If you enjoy a more bursty Caitlyn, or are just better with a more bursty Caitlyn, you may want to build those items in place of Phantom Dancer and Blade of the Ruined King.

Her other items include Last Whisper, which is almost always essential if the enemy builds even a relatively small amount of armor, and Frozen Mallet, which provides lots of sustainability and chasing power. All in all, this build fits Caitlyn's role almost perfectly.

3b. Builds: Bad Example

On Mobafire, there will always be good build guides, and there will always be bad build guides. Whether it is out of misinformation, bad calculations, or just pure ignorance, some people will put two and two together but still end up with five. Learning not to make the mistakes of these people will be very helpful, even though in the long (extremely long) run it wont make too much of a difference (more explaining in section 4).

Of course, there are also guides made to be humorous. Like this one. Which is funny. But still bad.

Name: Noxious Trap
Type: Active (R), Placeable, Damage over Time
Cooldown: 1 second per place
Cost: 75/100/125 mana per trap

Description: Teemo places a mushroom trap on the ground, which stealths and arms after 1 second. While armed, the traps grant vision in a radius. If an enemy comes within range of the trap, it will detonate, slowing them by 30/40/50% and dealing 200/325/450 (+80% AP) magic damage over 4 seconds to nearby enemies within its radius. Each mushroom has 100 health and can only be destroyed by auto-attacks.
Noxious Traps have a 10 minute duration. Teemo generates a new trap periodically, affected by cooldown reduction, and can only store up to 3 traps at once.

UNIQUE Passive - Ward Refresh: Starts with 5 charges and refills each time you visit the shop.

UNIQUE Active - Ghost Ward: Consumes a charge to place an invisible Ghost Ward that reveals the surrounding area for 3 minutes. You may have a maximum of 3 wards placed from this item at once. 1 second cooldown.

UNIQUE Active - Hunt: Summons 2 invulnerable ghosts for 6 seconds to seek the two nearest enemy champions. If they touch an enemy champion, they slow their movement speed by 40% and reveal them for 2.5 seconds. 120 second cooldown.

UNIQUE Passive – Eleisa's Blessing: If you gain 3 levels with this item, you gain all the effects permanently and this item is consumed.

Well, lets begin the analysis, shall we? Firstly, we need to ask the question: "Does this build fit the guide/champion's designated role?" to which we would answer "Kind of, yes."

However, a second question comes into light, "Does this role fit this champion, and is it both effective and practical?" Unfortunately, for this build, the answer is "No". It's practicality comes into question almost instantly, as well as it's effectiveness and how fitting the role is.

First, Teemo has several uses. He is made to poke enemies down with powerful Damage-over-Time and keep a good amount of map and movement control through the use of his mushrooms. This build does not at all utilize Teemo's poke ability, only focusing on his mushrooms, and in a way that does not synergize well enough (low ability power).

Second, although the amount of map control is absolutely exponential with the total amount of placeable wards in this build, it is not practical at all. The opposing team will actually benefit a lot just from buying an Oracle's Elixir, maybe even enough to pay it off. Also, you almost completely lose a damage dealer, making the game essentially a 4v5. Even if you know exactly when the enemy team is going to gank, where they will come from, and how, you will still be at a disadvantage for the most part.

Does that mean this build is 100% useless? No, but it is not at all efficient or practical enough to be used at a competitive standard. Although this might actually work with a skilled 5 man team, pretty much any build or comp can work with enough skill (again, more info in summary).

Of course, we already know that this guide is not viable since the author specifically said that at the start, classifying it as a humor guide. However, a lot of new guides come from authors that truly believe their build works, and a lot of times, those guides are not efficient or role-fitting, so be wary.

4a. Building: Analyzing and Comparing

Welcome to Part 4 of my guide, which will be the last, and longest, section of this guide. Now that we have a good understanding on how champions are built for their roles, we're going to go ahead and create out own build from nothing but our minds!

Let's begin by selecting a champion to build on. I have decided to go with Draven, because he has both an awesome kit and an awesome moustache. First, we'll start by analyzing his abilities.

Description: Draven's critical strikes deal 30 + (4 × level) bonus physical damage over 4 seconds. Spinning Axe also causes this effect even if it does not critically strike. If Wicked Blades is re-applied to a target, its duration is reset to 4 seconds and any damage not yet dealt is carried forward, increasing the amount of each tick of damage.

Description: Draven starts spinning his axe, making his next attack deal bonus physical damage equal to 45%/55%/65%/75%/85% of attack damage. Wicked Blades is also applied to the target.
This axe will ricochet off the target high up into the air, landing 2 seconds later at a location determined by Draven's current movement direction and speed. If Draven catches it, Spinning Axe will be applied to his next attack.
Draven can have up to two Spinning Axes readied at once.

Description: Draven hurls two massive axes in a given direction, dealing 175/275/375 (+ 110% bonus AD) physical damage.
Upon reaching the edge of the map, striking an enemy champion or upon the reactivation of Whirling Death, the axes will slowly come to a stop before changing direction and returning to Draven, dealing the same damage to every enemy struck on the way back.
Whirling Death deals 8% less damage for each unit hit, down to a minimum of 40%. The damage reduction resets when the axes reverse direction.

Now that we have a good understanding of Draven's abilities, lets compare some items to his abilities and see which ones have similar effects or synergize nicely.

First, we must remove anything that cannot fit with Draven's skillset. The obvious one here is Liandry's Torment, which is an Ability Power item.

Second, we must remove anything that does not fit our role as Bursty-DPS Carry. I have decided to remove Spirit of the Elder Lizard since it leans to a more poke-oriented role, and although it CAN work on Draven, it does not fit our role since the effect does not stack, just reapply.

What we are left with is The Black Cleaver. Its passive does stack, and can be stacked by Wicked Blades too. Since Armor Penetration is also quite powerful (especially flat penetration, which is helpful regardless of how much armor the enemy has), and The Black Cleaver offers both survivability, damage AND cooldown reduction, I think it's a great addition to Bursty-DPS Carry Draven.

We remove Lich Bane because it does not fit our skillset, and then we remove Iceborn Gauntlet since it doesn't fit both our skillset or role. We are left with Trinity Force, and I like it too. It fits almost perfectly with our build of Draven, giving him an incredible amount of damage output from just a single modified autoattack, and all of the additional stats given by Trinity Force, aside from the Ability Power, is used effectively.

However, there is a problem. In order for Trinity Force's Spellblade passive to be used, we need to use an ability. Draven doesn't seem to have any spammable abilities, right? Wrong.

THIS will be our spammable ability. Every time we catch a Spinning Axe, we can activate this and proc Trinity Force's Spellblade passive. Throw empowered axe, catch, activate ability, repeat.

There are also two other items on the list, and although they both fit Draven's role well enough, I've chosen not to select them for several reasons. Specifically regarding Youmuu's Ghostblade, it's unique passive has a collision with The Black Cleaver. Specifically regarding Sword of the Divine, it's active ability is great, but even with the cooldown reduction, it has just too much cooldown and too little intermixed damage potential to be worth purchasing. Regarding both items, they just do not offer enough SUSTAINED damage to fit our role too.

Although Berserker's Greaves gives us additional DPS, which is always good, we need to remember that the entirety of Draven's damage output is based on catching and throwing his Spinning Axe's. If he fails to catch an axe due to crowd control, he can be caught in a very sticky situation. There are two ways to remedy this: Tenacity, which reduces the duration of CC, or Cooldown Reduction, which allows us to get another Spinning Axe up faster.

Since we pretty much have everything we need, we should build on more damage, since our damage output is a little bit puny right now for an almost-full build. I've chosen to grab Infinity Edge, since we have a lot of Critical Strike Chance built up from Phantom Dancer and Trinity Force, and that additional crit damage can be an incredible boost in both burst and sustained damage.

Build Order
We finally have our build! Still, it is not 100% complete; we have yet to expand on the build order. Build order is quite an important part of an item build, since grabbing a Guardian Angel as your first item is a large mistake if you are a main damage dealer. Learning which items to buy first and when to buy them is an integral part of any build guide.

Since our Draven build has a lot of expensive items in it, we want to focus on a strong early/mid game so that we may snowball and expand on our late game. For this reason, our first item will be a Doran's Blade. Although we do not have much sustain with this item pick, it is very helpful in supplementing Draven's high-damage early game, giving him a good source of Attack Damage and enough health to win most early trades.

Next, we'll buy a Sheen. At this point, your damage output should be very high for the level you're at. You should have at least one tower down, and should be going around the map pushing other lanes at this point. If you are not snowballing in your lane, or are losing somehow, just stay and farm a bit more, and try to finish your biggest item...

Your boots are a somewhat situational point of purchase. Generally, if you are buying Berserker's Greaves, this is a good point to buy them. If you are purchasing any of the other boots, you should get them after The Bloodthirster, and while we're on that...

At this point, you're rolling into the late game, and you'll be needing more DPS than Burst. Luckily enough, our final two items are DPS items, the Phantom Dancer and Infinity Edge.

And there we go! We have finished our item build. Here's how it looks:

Item Sequence

Boots of Speed300

B. F. Sword1300

Sheen1050

Item Sequence

The Bloodthirster3700

Trinity Force3733

The Black Cleaver3100

Phantom Dancer2550

Infinity Edge3600

Annex I: Summary & Credits

Hopefully you have learned many things from this, mainly two things:

1. How to build a champion to your own playstyle/roles.
2. How to detect whether a build is good or bad.

This would be a good time to remind you that a lot of powerful item builds were found through trial and error, not just theorycrafting like we were just doing. A lot of the time, a build that sounds good in theory will not work at all in practice, and vice versa. Just remember that trial and error is a thing everyone goes through when trying out their builds.

I also want to say that I have completely put out masteries, runes, skill sequences, and summoner spells from this guide. Those things are not as important as the game progresses, but are very helpful at the start. I recommend you take the knowledge you gained from this guide and apply it to those fields in the same way.

As my very last note, I would like to remind you one final thing: Regardless of item build, enemy side and own, a player skilled enough to do so will be able to win any confrontation with any champion. An item build is nothing more than supporting a way to achieve those means. Having the perfect item build will not make a difference if you are unwilling to improve yourself first.

I would like to give thanks to Luther3000 and DKitten for letting me reference their build guides as examples.

I would like to thank Jhoijhoi for giving me a few readily usable templates (and helping me understand BBCoding in general). As good as I am at judging it, I am terrible at making a good looking guide, so this helped a lot albeit the guide still not having the best formatting.

I would also like to credit the LoLWiki for giving me the proper resources to write this guide. Of course, I also have Mobafire to thank for that as well.

Also, if you see any issues with the guide, please remind me. I am readily open to constructive criticism, and since I got into LoL just recently, I may still miss a few things here and there.

Finally, a big thanks to you for reading.

Annex II: Building Tips

These are some few important tips to remember when building your champions.

1. Poor Scaling: A champion has low ability scaling but high base damage.

Annex III: Q&A

Answer:The reason why I made those icons so big is so that they can easily catch the readers eye, and in turn, make sure that they see the statistics for that item/ability. Analyzing champion skillsets and items are exponentially more important than people think it is; you may say "Oh, I use spam abilities a lot with Champion X, so I should buy Chalice of Harmony so I can spam more!" before you realize that your abilities use less mana the more you spam them and that the scaling on those abilities are high. I have fallen prey to these mistakes too, just because I thought I could "Skim over" the item/ability descriptions (I once thought Trinity Force scales with TOTAL AD, not BASE AD. How overpowered would that be?).

League of Legends is a team based, real time strategy game set in a mythical world of swords & magic where epic battles decide the fate of mystical nations. Game players take on the role of a Summoner who conjures and controls champions to fight for them at the Institute of War. During game play champions gain experience and items to enhance their skills and abilities. How players develop and play their champions can be the difference between a crushing defeat or a glorious victory!